The Birthday Cake
by Sleepwalker
Summary: QuiGon tests his skills in Valia's apartment kitchen.


The Birthday Cake

**The Birthday Cake**

by Sleepwalker   


**Fandom: **Star Wars   
**Category:** Romance   
**Rating:** PG  
**Spoilers: **None  
**Feedback: **Oh, yes please. Send all feedback to reinert@tir.com **  
Warnings:** None, unless you have a problem with too much sugar, or can't stand being in the kitchen  
**Time:** 6 years before TPM, one year after 'Forbidden Fruit'  
**Disclaimers: **All characters and settings belonging to George Lucas are regarded as his property. Same goes for Jude Watson. The rest are products of my own imagination. Nothing has been earned from this work, other than a lot of butt-time in front of the computer.  
**Author's note:** All right, I've seen several 'Qui-Gon in the kitchen' fan-fics out there. Here is my slightly gooey offerings.

This is for Astara, who gave me the idea for this piece, and who is always there for me with a recipe to exchange. 

___________________________________________________________________

Qui-Gon told himself to not look at the decorative chrono propped between the potted plants on the shelf just above his head. It would do him no good, because he knew it was only five minutes since the last time he had looked at it. Or less. How was it that things took so much longer to cook when you needed them to be cooked immediately?  
  
The cake looked no different than it had five minutes before. Except for a slight bubbling on the left side. It was higher on that side now, he was sure of it. Would it be level, he wondered with some apprehension. He would have to do some trimming if it wasn't. He told himself to not worry about a problem that didn't exist. Yet. The heat radiating through the view window of the baking unit warmed the end of his nose, nearly pressed to the transparent surface. He imagined the comic picture he must make, hunkered down in the small apartment kitchen to watch a fascinating chemical drama taking place inside a kitchen appliance. He was going to singe his mustache if he got any closer. He sighed and stood up.  
  
An exercise in patience, he reminded himself, drumming his fingers on the compact work surface, which was dusted with flour. Any task could be turned into an exercise. But this wasn't supposed to be an exercise. Just once, he could do something for pleasure. If not his own, then at least for someone else.  
  
The pleasure aspect was up for debate. Cooking was definitely not his strong point, something Valia good-naturedly teased him about. Especially when it was done in her apartment. His searches for ingredients often resulted in his lady friend laughing at him and eventually taking over the task, sending him off to set the table, or more likely something completely unrelated to the meal. And some of the instructions simply made no sense to him. All these archaic terms, a vocabulary that made sense only to someone who had spent a lifetime in kitchens and near those that cooked on a regular basis. Thank the Force for the unfeeling patience of utility droids, who would display translations and idiot-proof instructions on their data screens when it was obvious the user needed them.  
  
He had gotten this far without too much of a mess, he thought gratefully. He would have this cleaned up before she got home from work. He glanced around. If he started cleaning now, he might stand a chance of having it done. Flour was treacherous stuff to measure, as he had discovered. White spots dusted the floor and countertops, and there were assorted comet-tails of it streaking his pants. Eggs were a subject all their own when it came to the topic of messes. He had seen Valia deftly cracking them with one hand several times before. With bravado worthy only of a first-year Padawan, and encouraged by the fact that he was alone, he had tried it himself. Practice made perfect, he reminded himself, as he regarded the drying egg white trail and scattering of shell where it had slithered down the outside of the bowl. Not to mention the egg itself, which was already congealing into a wrinkled yellow amoeba on the work surface. The spattering of egg that had gone up his sleeve was already dry, but there were still a few bits of shell clinging to the fabric. He picked them off. Qui-Gon threw them into the waste bin, where they joined the remains of two other eggs, which had more or less ended up on the floor.  
  
Clean as you go, Valia was fond of saying. But didn't it make more sense to make all the mess there was to be made, and then clean it all at once afterwards? He thought this way was more logical. He still had fruit to prepare, and glaze to mix with it, and frosting and those things sounded potentially messy. Normally he would consider himself and neat and tidy man, but there were times, like now, when the learning experience asked for a little leeway.  
  
Make her a cake, he recalled her friend Ravi Brillion crowing with the joy of what he thought was the perfect idea for her birthday. Make her a cake indeed, thought Qui-Gon with the beginnings of grumbling irritation at himself for listening to her friend. But Ravi had been insistent, even providing the recipe for him and offering to go with him to purchase the ingredients in the market. He'd gone out of his way to make it easy for him. Qui-Gon had found himself agreeing, more to quiet the boisterous young man. It was her favorite, he promised, her absolute favorite cake. The Jedi Master had found himself in the depths of the produce stalls in a local marketplace, dryly marveling at how much finesse someone could put into squeezing each and every mareon to find the perfectly ripe ones. He had patiently stood by while Ravi had nearly pranced from stall to stall selecting, poking, sniffing, exulting, tasting, and flirting. Male or female seller, it had apparently made no difference to Ravi. Qui-Gon reminded himself to ask Valia, just out of curiosity, what Ravi's preference actually was.  
  
Here he was, speculating about someone else's sexual orientation, and there was an alarming smell in the air. Smoke, he thought with the thready beginnings of fear. Oh, Sith, there was a rivulet of batter running over the side of the pan in the unit and dripping into the bottom. He watched helplessly as the gooey stuff bubbled and smoked, all the while merrily overflowing. He glanced at the timer, and hoped not too much more would run over before the baking time was up.  
  
It was actually beginning to get hazy in the kitchen. He had wanted to attempt this task without any use of the Force, but this was getting serious. Qui-Gon willed the batter to stop flowing. A crusty dam formed at the edge of the pan. He sighed with relief, and walked into the sitting room to open a window. He went back to the kitchen and consulted the recipe for what had to be the thirtieth time. Yes, he had added the right amounts of everything to the feed tube, he had not added too much.  
  
When the baking cycle ended and the chime sounded from the unit, he carefully removed the cake with oven-mitts, which were too small for his hands. He eyed it as he set the hot pan on the work surface. Now all he needed was the patience to wait while the thing cooled. Was it supposed to be sinking like that? Worried, he watched the top collapse. Quickly he scrolled through the information on the baking unit's data screen. Yes, this was normal. He sighed with relief.  
  
He was getting downright fretful over this whole thing, he thought with irritation. Break it down into smaller tasks, take each one at a time. All right, then: fruit or frosting first? He consulted the recipe again, leaving another sticky finger streak down the front of the datapad's smooth screen. Something else to clean up afterwards.  
  
The recipe told him to prepare the frosting next, since that had to chill. Finding what he needed in the grocery sack on the floor, he carefully measured the right ingredients into a mixer. He'd seen Valia use this dozens of times, watch her flick it on and walk away to tackle some other job. He activated it and finely powdered sugar spewed forth in a perfect imitation of a small white volcano. Lumps arced through the air to leave interesting white spatter marks on the floor. Qui-Gon calmly turned off the device and scowled at it, hands on his hips. No problem, he could estimate how much sugar he had lost. He added some in and took note of the power level, which had been left on high from the last use. He turned it to its lowest setting and activated it again. No eruptions this time. He looked down at his tunic and brushed the white powder off in clouds. An apron probably would have helped, he thought, remembering Valia had several cast-offs from her fruit and juice bar hanging in a nearby closet.   
  
Was this stuff supposed to be lumpy, he wondered, after mixing for the instructed amount of time. He cautiously probed at the contents of the bowl with a spoon. It didn't look right.  
  
In the end it was brute strength that resulted in a perfectly smooth and creamy frosting. He picked up bowl and spoon, and making a gruff noise, began beating it by hand. He paced around the apartment, to the sitting room and back to the kitchen to occupy himself while he did it.  
  
With that in the refrigerator, he began sorting through the rest of the contents of the bag. He arranged the fruits in separate piles by type, and wondered if he was supposed to cut all this up. What was he doing, making fruit salad or a cake? He checked the holo depicting the finished cake and decided it looked like a lot of fruit piled on the top. Ravi had been quite insistent on using extra fruit besides, as she liked a lot. Qui-Gon rolled his sleeves past his elbows and methodically went about rinsing and slicing fruit.  
  
This wasn't so bad, he thought, as he fell into a rhythm. The berries didn't need to be cut, so he dumped them all into a bowl. He touched a control on a wall panel with his elbow and turned on some music. Today Valia was thirty-one Standard years old. If she was so inclined, she could celebrate another birthday based on the years of her homeworld Nyme'. She would be a few years younger, if measured by those years. Her planet took more days to circle its sun than Coruscant, on which Standard years were based. Her world took a little longer to get around. 'You've got that right!' would be the disparaging snort Qui-Gon could imagine she might make in response to that, a response that would neatly sum up her attitude toward the slow, quaint, and sometimes backwater ways of her birthplace.  
  
Ahh, you could take the lady out of the country, but you couldn't take the country out of the lady, he thought fondly. Deep down she preferred the slow and the quaint, and however she might claim to love her adopted home, the fast paced city-planet of Coruscant, her roots in the natural and simple ran deep.  
  
He had quite a lot of fruit now. Was it enough for his sweet country lady? He thought so. It was quite a colorful mixture, he admitted. Now to add the glaze, which would give it that shine in the holo picture, and the recipe background data cheerfully informed him would keep the fruit from turning an unsightly brown and sweeten it.  
  
He picked the grocery sack from the floor and upended the last of its contents on the kitchen table. There it was, fruit glaze. He ripped the top off the packet and squeezed it over the full bowl of fruit. It was thick, gluey stuff. He frowned at it, hoping it really lived up to its claims. It was stubbornly refusing to leave its protective package. He tightened his hand, squeezing a formidable fist around the package until all that remained was a subdued, crackling, empty husk of a package. Satisfied, he started mixing. He snitched a piece of mareon out of the bowl and popped it into his mouth. This whole thing was going to be tasty. Maybe Ravi's overdone choosiness had been worth it. He ate another piece, and then remembered the time he had heard Valia cautioning her employees against snitching, as it was a prime source of mouth-to-hand contamination. If she had seen him, she probably would have given him a friendly warning pat on the wrist for doing it. Actually if she had seen him right at the moment, that probably was the last thing she would have noticed in her surprise. To his knowledge, she had never seen him cook anything all by himself.  
  
Now came the tricky part: assembling all this into something that resembled the holo. The instructions told him to scoop out part of the top of the cake. Scoop it out?? After all that trouble of making it level? He did so, as neatly as he could. Now what to do with this little pile of cake pieces and crumbs? He popped a piece into his mouth. Not bad, he thought. In fact, he was surprised to find it good. He put the crumbs aside, not wanting to throw out any part of all this effort. Valia would surely find a practical use for them.  
  
Sith, he had forgotten to split the cake horizontally. Now what? Not to worry, he told himself. That could still be done. As soon as he found the right tool to do it with, he thought, searching through drawers and cubby-holes. A knife, a very long, thin knife is what he needed. His search was getting longer and more fruitless, and time was wasting. She would be home soon. 

He didn't waste too much more time justifying the use of the lightsaber to himself. It was a tool to be used in defense only, and in this case, a good defense against wasted time. He removed it from his belt and made some adjustments in the handle. A fine, thin bright beam flared from it when he activated it, thin and sharp as any knife. He carefully positioned the cake before him and took aim. A quick level cut, and the cake was split, with just the merest browning. He reset his saber and re-holstered it with satisfaction. He brushed away some clinging over-toasted crumbs.  
  
Qui-Gon consulted the recipe one more time, and began following the instructions. The cheery artificial voice from the data pad was obnoxious, and it was annoying him. He had thought to listen while he worked, but he shut the audio off and read the words instead. Enough of that obsequious voice.  
  
Were all these crumbs supposed to be getting mixed in with the frosting? He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure how to prevent it from happening. Something else to ask Lia later. Now the cake was getting alarmingly high, towering under a mound of fruit. By the time he had filled between the layers, covered the sides and top, and filled in the depression in the top with fruit, it looked on the verge of collapse. Well, this is what happened when you followed the advice of a half-wit, he thought. No, this was not happening! One of the sides was cracking. His creation was imploding before his eyes and sliding sideways. Without deliberating about it, he used the Force to shore up the side and hold it there.  
  
A couple more touch-ups here and there, and he was done. Now the trick would be to keep enough concentration on that side to prevent it from collapsing while he cleaned up the kitchen. He still had time, unless she came home early. He licked an errant dab of frosting off his thumb and glanced at the chrono.  
  
He was just putting his newly cleaned shirt back on when he heard her at the door. Every speck of flour and sugar had been cleaned up and every utensil and dish had been washed and put away. The cake was sitting on the end of the counter-top where she would see it. 

She breezed into the apartment and threw her bag into a chair in front of the comm station. She was tired, but her eyes still lit up when she saw him.  
  
"Happy birthday," he said, pulling her into a hug.  
  
"Thank you!" Valia wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. "Oh, cake!" She noticed the dessert. She shamelessly swiped a fingertip through the thick white frosting on the side and licked it. "Mmmmmmm. How very sweet of you. Where did you find a bakery that made one of these?" She plucked a dark red berry off the top and enjoyed that, too.  
  
"I didn't. I made it."  
  
Valia stared at the cake, and then back at him in disbelief. Her eyes narrowed teasingly and she partially turned her head to give him that sideways look of hers. "Then who helped you?"  
  
"Ravi helped with the supplies, but after that I was on my own." Perhaps he should have left all the mess in her kitchen after all, to prove to her he'd made it.  
  
She put her hands on her hips and looked at it again. "Ha! Well, look at that," she said, stepping forward to admire it more closely. "Look at that..." she said more softly. "You're a man of many unexpected talents." Qui-Gon bowed, and allowed himself to savor a moment of pride in his accomplishment. She apparently didn't notice the frosting was speckled with crumbs and the whole creation was a little lopsided. She grinned. "You and Ravi actually went shopping together?" she laughed, imagining the sight of her flamboyant friend and a probably scowling Jedi Master towering behind him the entire time.  
  
"Yes. Had it not been for all the flirting, the trip would have taken half the time, I'm sure."  
  
"Flirting? Oh, that's just Ravi," she waved a hand as if to say she didn't even notice it any more. "Did he make a pass at you, that naughty boy?"  
  
"Actually, everyone but me," Qui-Gon's brow wrinkled. Thank the Force for that. "And this is the second time I've heard him mention he thinks Obi-Wan is cute."  
  
Valia laughed. "Well, he is." She shrugged off her cloak and stooped to pull off her boots. "Oh, don't get all bothered about it," she said at the look on his face that was a mixture of worry and protectiveness.  
  
"Lia, which way does he...ahhSpurely out of curiosity, I'm asking..."  
  
"It depends." She laughed at the puzzled look on his face. "He, ummm, goes either way. He doesn't see gender when he's attracted to someone." Qui-Gon simply nodded, brows raised. She laughed again, and moved to put her arms around him again. "I know what I see right now," she said.   
  
"Hmm. What do you see?" he asked into the hair at the top of her head.  
  
"I see the makings of a very, very happy birthday," she said, contentedly leaning her cheek against his chest. She went still as though looking closely at something. She leaned to the side. "I see frosting on the wall." She leaned over and wiped it off with a finger. Qui-Gon smiled and shrugged in her arms. She stood on tip-toe to kiss him. No quick one for all the effort he had gone to making that cake for her, she thought. Valia put all the thanks she could into it.  
  
Sometime in the middle of the kiss, Qui-Gon heard a very small, wet sliding noise behind them, and knew the side of the cake had collapsed. So much for concentration, he thought, sliding his arms more tightly around Valia.  
  


**THE END**


End file.
